jMonkeyEngine 3

jMonkey is a Java 3D game engine. It uses OpenGL via LWJGL and JOGL. For sound it supports OpenAL.

The release of version 3 of the engine is drawing near. A really nice feature is that they have implemented an IDE called jMonkeyPlatform. This IDE is based on NetBeans and has everything ready for game development.

I installed the Aplpha 2 on my Ubuntu 10.04 first, but I had problems with the SceneViewer Window. I haven’t solved that problem. On my Vista box, it plays niceley, though. If you try to install it on Ubuntu do not install it as sudo. Use your normal user to install it.

I haved worked my way through the Tutorials for beginners. With the jMonkeyPlatform the tutorials are easy to follow as most libraries is preconfigured. The only not totally obvious thing was that the models used for some of the tutorials was stored in the jme3testdata jar. You have to include that in your project to be able to run the examples. To do that, right-click on the Libraries-folder in your project explorer and select ‘Add Library…‘. You can then select the needed library from the list:

Select jme3-test-data to include it in your project

The tutotials has simple examples for most everything you want to do like picking, animation, asset handling. It is really easy to start 3D programming this way.

If you have trouble finding the javadocs they are in the zip-file jMonkeyEngine3-javadoc.zip.